Latest: New pesticide regulations for Oregon timber companieshttps://www.hcn.org/issues/47.4/latest-new-pesticide-regulations-for-oregon-timber-companies
Companies must now give officials at least a week’s notice before spraying. BACKSTORYIn recent years, timber companies have begun spraying herbicides from helicopters to kill competitive forest weeds (“Fallout,” HCN, 11/10/14). Some of those chemicals used, such as 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid — an ingredient in Agent Orange — have sickened nearby residents; some can even cause kidney failure. Oregon is alone among Western states in allowing aerial spraying near homes and schools with no advance warning.

FOLLOWUPOn Feb. 10, Oregon legislators proposed a law requiring timber companies to give officials at least a week’s notice before aerial pesticide spraying and to identify which chemicals they plan to use and where. The bill also directs the state’s Agriculture Department to establish no-spray residential buffer zones. “Oregon isn’t doing enough to protect the health of rural citizens from aerial herbicide sprays,” state Sen. Michael Dembrow told The Oregonian. “It’s time to change these outdated policies.”

]]>No publisherOregonPollutionU.S. Forest ServiceNorthwestForestsPublic healthLatest2015/03/02 04:05:00 GMT-7ArticleWilderness as therapisthttps://www.hcn.org/issues/47.3/wilderness-as-therapist
A growing number of veterans and researchers are racing to understand nature’s power to heal.One of the environmental movement’s most legendary characters was also a traumatized war vet. You might remember George Washington Hayduke for his inventive, destructive antics, but he was also a man who measured road miles by the number of six-packs it took him to drink while driving and whose mind often wandered back to Vietnam. “What’s more American,” Hayduke wonders in Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, “than violence?”

The fictional Hayduke had a real-life model: a former Army medic named Doug Peacock. Peacock served in Vietnam during his 20s, and as he went through the violence of that war, the thing he carried was a map of the Northern Rockies. He brought it out during rare quiet moments and imagined himself in its contours, rolling over the sharp granite creases of the Wind River Mountains or the grassy meadows north of Yellowstone Lake. When he returned from the war, he returned to nature, studying grizzlies for several decades and fighting for their federal protection, as well as for that of other threatened species. These days, the 72-year-old activist and writer has become a new role model, not just for greens, but for a new generation of veterans.

“What they need to do is go out and immerse (themselves) in the wild,” he said recently. “Let it wrap around you. See what it does to you.”

The idea of wilderness as therapy for veterans is nothing new. In recent years, a growing number of such programs are springing up around it. But in order for it to work on the scale that’s needed, its supporters are going to have to get the military behind it. And that’s where the difficulty lies.

There are some 21 million American veterans today, 4 million in the West alone, who have served in places from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan. Half of Iraq and Afghanistan vets have received mental health diagnoses including post-traumatic stress, which can lead to high rates of alcohol or drug abuse, domestic violence and suicide. In 2010, an estimated 6,000 vets committed suicide — on average 16 a day, and 20 percent of the U.S. total. More soldiers have died from self-inflicted wounds than service members died in combat between 2002 and 2013.

The federal Department of Veterans Affairs is supposed to help, but the agency seems overwhelmed. Treatment rates have improved in recent years, but 242,000 vets report not receiving treatment within four months of requesting it. The VA predicts it will treat 6.6 million vets in 2015.

A persistent lack of funding and increasingly common and hard-to-treat problems like traumatic brain injury have combined with bureaucratic red tape to breed distrust among veterans about the agency’s effectiveness. A national scandal last year, when it was revealed that the VA had exaggerated how quickly it was treating people, made things even worse. A recent survey showed that almost a third of veterans with PTSD or traumatic brain injury now drop out of treatment, citing lack of progress, and the same number never bother to ask for help.

Meanwhile, a growing number of vets are finding ways to help themselves –– particularly in the wild. A leading proponent of this approach is Stacy Bare, a 36-year-old Iraq War veteran and the director of Sierra Club Military Outdoors, a prominent wilderness program for veterans. At 6-foot-7, broad-boned and with an impossibly deep baritone voice, Bare is an imposing figure, one who is inspiring to many service members finding their way through trauma. A climber, skier and mountaineer, who likes to end his emails with the message “Stay stoked!” Bare is well aware of the benefits of nature.

“We know intuitively that outdoor recreation can provide a quantifiable mental health benefit,” he says. “But for policy and for funders, we have to make sure that we have strong monitoring and -evaluation behind it.”

That’s because, while there are a growing number of one-off partnerships between outdoor organizations and local VA hospitals, the VA as an entire agency is not fully on board with wilderness as therapy. And that’s because Bare and others can’t prove that it works. “Across the board, people haven’t done a good job showing the results,” he says. “We’ve done a lot of nice things for veterans, but what are the things that really work?”

Right now, there’s a wide range of existing wilderness programs for vets: The VA partner Wasatch Adaptive Sports gets them skiing and camping outside Salt Lake; Project Healing Waters takes them fly-fishing around the country; Idaho-based Higher Ground hosts eight-week sports camps for vets and their families; the Army’s own Warrior Adventure Quest teaches “alternatives to aberrant behavior,” such as paint ball, rock climbing and scuba diving. Outward Bound Veterans and Sierra Club Military Outdoors take hundreds of vets outdoors each year.

But just because these kinds of programs appear to be working doesn’t mean that researchers understand how. And until that happens, it will be hard to create a coherent, officially sanctioned program, especially through the VA writ large.

“I think there’s interest, but there is not necessarily a national acceptance of adventure-based experiences within the VA,” says psychologist David Scheinfeld, director of research for Project Rebirth, a nonprofit that develops healing programs for first responders and vets, who recently became a post-doctoral fellow for the VA in Austin, Texas. “The VA needs data showing it’s effective, safe, that it’s worth -supporting.”

Scheinfeld is working to provide that data. Last fall, in partnership with Outward Bound, he studied the psychological impacts of outdoor experiences for veterans. Though not yet peer-reviewed, that study is one of the closest examinations of the value of nature in treating war trauma. Scheinfeld observed how anxiety, sense of purpose and other health indicators changed for 199 vets before, immediately after and one month following an outdoor experience, such as mountaineering or backpacking for a week. The majority of veterans showed improvements, including increased willingness to seek professional help, lower rates of depression and enhanced feelings of social connection, though some of those changes tapered off after a month.

This kind of research could also help assuage critics who say outdoor companies and guides stand to profit from more widespread programs.

“The VA (is) very data-driven,” says Jennifer Romesser, a clinical psychologist at the Salt Lake VA, who helps run veterans outdoor programs. “That’s why this research is so important.”

Stacy Bare climbs Whale’s Tail in Eldorado Canyon State Park, Colorado. His first climbing experience on the Flatirons outside of Boulder, Colorado, in 2008, led the Iraq War veteran to become part of a movement to get other vets into the outdoors.

Chris Kassar

Stacy Bare and a growing number of “stoked” vets know this, so they are working hard to get the VA the data it needs to act. Bare is now helping with a three-year pilot study, bringing together Sierra Club Military Outdoors, Outward Bound, Project Rebirth and Georgetown University.

The study will gather groups of nine to 12 veterans and integrate therapeutic outdoor experiences with more traditional mental health treatment, testing the effects while researching ways to partner with local VA centers. (The first group will spend a week in April rafting Cataract Canyon in Utah with Outward Bound.)

As part of the three-year study, 37-year-old Josh Brandon, who served three tours in the Iraq War, is establishing research hubs in Washington state. Like Bare, Brandon is sold on nature as therapist.

Brandon served as an infantry officer in the Army in his first tour in Iraq — “like the guys on TV, who are dirty, have rifles and are getting into street fights.” As an advisor to Iraqi forces in 2006, he saw civil war and ethnic cleansing in Baghdad. By the beginning of his third tour in 2009, he was drinking pretty hard, but by the end of it, he told me, “I came home with ‘death eyes.’ ”

He tried the VA, but at the clinic in Lakewood, Washington, he saw soldiers with amputated limbs and gruesome scars, and “it scared the shit out of me,” he recalled. It also convinced him that other vets needed help even more than he did. He started getting together with Army buddies, doing crash courses with a local mountain guide, and then going out on expeditions, where teamwork and goals created a positive space for recovery. On his first attempt to summit Mount Rainier, he ran into 60 mph winds and rock falls. It was, he says, “awesome.” Somewhere along the way, the death eyes went away.

Brandon says his main goal remains getting vets the help they need. But he’s discovered an interesting fringe benefit: Not only can nature help vets, he says, but they can return the favor –– by helping nature. And a recent survey showed that 75 percent of post-9/11 war vets who live in Western states favor federal protection of public lands. Much like Hayduke, Brandon has become a warrior for the wilderness. And he’s not the only veteran who feels that way, he says: “I call it defending our land a second time.”

]]>No publisherRecreationWildernessPublic LandsPeople & PlacesCommunitiesPublic healthNew ResearchNot on homepage2015/02/16 03:10:00 GMT-7ArticleAfter a string of accidents, refinery workers strike for safetyhttps://www.hcn.org/articles/after-a-string-of-accidents-refinery-workers-strike-for-safety
Federal and state investigations have found lax safety practices at oil refineries going back a decade.On Feb. 1, negotiations over a new contract between oil companies and United Steelworkers union representing the nation’s refinery workers came to a halt. Company negotiators left the bargaining table. At midnight, roughly 3,800 workers began a strike at nine oil refineries in Texas, California, Washington and Kentucky.

Within a week, over a thousand workers at two more refineries in Indiana and Ohio had joined in the strike for safer working conditions. (The last nationwide strike, which was largely over whether workers should receive dental plans, involved 60,000 workers at 100 refineries and lasted three months in 1980.)

Complaints about safety are not unusual in the refining industry, where a string of accidents and explosions over the past decade have fueled a reputation for sloppy safety practices. But last week marked a turning point: For the first time in three decades, workers in refineries across the country went on strike to demand substantial changes to how employers prepare workers for dangerous work conditions.

The process of refining oil is both complicated and dangerous. Refineries receive crude oil from places like the Bakken in North Dakota and the oil sands of Canada, generally a mix of hydrocarbon chains, like butane or methane, which can be turned into things like jet fuel to asphalt. In the refinery, that oil is heated in order to separate out different components, then cooled, and heated and cooled several times over again. The process exerts huge pressure on the machinery and can produce highly combustible vapors. Even a small crack in the equipment can lead to an explosion.

“There's no real safe space anywhere in those refineries,” says Ryan Anderson, the lead union negotiator for the Tesoro refinery in Anacortes, Washington, where workers have been on strike for 12 days.

Without proper training and constant vigilance, workers are unlikely to be able to identify warning signs such as abnormal heat or vibrations before a problem erupts. What’s more, Anderson says, there’s a widespread “run to fail” culture at refineries, in which equipment is used to the breaking point.

The result, in some cases, can be catastrophic failure. In 2005, an explosion at a BP facility in Texas City, Texas, where workers are currently on strike, killed 15 employees. A federal investigation found that workers did not receive sufficient training and had worked nearly a month of 12-hour shifts, without a day off. After an explosion in 2010 at the Tesoro refinery in Anacortes killed seven, a state investigation identified a lack of training and a failure to inspect equipment for damage.

While those accidents prompted the industry to restrict the number of shifts a refinery operator typically works and to retire some machinery earlier, union members say those issues still arise. At the Tesoro refinery, Anderson says refinery operators and technicians often work overtime on 12-hour shifts and are forced to complete time-sensitive tasks without enough trained backup to do it safely.

The union is calling for better training, as well as more staffing to distribute the workload and less reliance on overtime to minimize exhausted workers.

Royal Dutch Shell, which is leading the negotiations for the five companies affected, hasn’t publicly responded to the union’s push, except to contest the accusations of poor safety practices and reiterate the need for a "mutually satisfactory agreement."

While past federal and state investigations have laid much of the blame for refinery fatalities on oil companies, investigators have struggled to force them to make changes. The U.S. Chemical Safety Board, which investigates accidents, has no legal authority to force companies to improve safety. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration and its state affiliates are charged with holding refineries legally accountable, but lack the staffing and influence to force refineries to comply. Annual inspections are not required. Instead, inspectors are sent following a referral from another agency or a complaint from an employee.

If state agencies do aggressively pursue a legal charge, they risk lengthy and expensive legal battles.

After state investigators levied a record-breaking fine of nearly $2.4 million against Tesoro following the 2010 explosion, the company appealed. Nearly five years later, the case is still making its way through the courts. Just last week, a judge once again reduced the fine, which is now less than a quarter of the original citation.

It’s unclear whether the union has the clout to force corporations, through the current negotiations, to change. As of Thursday Feb. 12, just under 5,000 workers at 11 refineries were on strike. One refinery in Martinez, California has extended a planned maintenance shutdown as a result, but operations at the others have not been impacted.

Still, Anderson hopes the strike will force refineries to change their practices.

“Any real and meaningful improvements we've made have been countered by going back in other areas,” he says. “It was time we did this.”

Talks between the union and Royal Dutch Shell are likely to resume soon but there’s no word on how long the strikes are likely to last.

Kate Schimel is an editorial intern at High Country News. Follow her @kateschimel.

Featured image courtesy of Flickr user Scott Butner. Image license is available here.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryPublic healthPoliticsWashingtonPeople & PlacesEconomy2015/02/13 04:15:00 GMT-7ArticleFewer trade secrets for Wyoming fracking fluidhttps://www.hcn.org/articles/wyoming-win-fracking-fluids-transparency
A court settlement will make it harder for companies to hide chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing.In 2010 Wyoming became the first state to require oil and gas companies to disclose chemicals used in fracking operations. Home to the petroleum-rich Powder River Basin, proponents saw the rule as a model for other drilling-dependent states to follow. The message they hoped the regulation would convey: We can be energy-friendly and environmentally friendly too.

But the rule contained a trade secrets caveat, which allowed companies to skirt the disclosure requirement if they said the chemicals were confidential business information. That exemption created a massive loophole. Now, thanks to a settlement approved Jan. 23, companies will have to do more to justify keeping fracking chemicals secret.

The settlement comes from a 2012 lawsuit that environmental nonprofit Earthjustice filed on behalf of public interest groups against the Wyoming Oil & Gas Conservation Commission. The suit challenged state regulators’ decisions to withhold the names of 128 fracking chemicals. It was the first time a Wyoming court interpreted trade secrets under the state’s Public Records Act, which puts the public’s right to know before a company’s protection.

Though some research has shown fracking—the drilling method that injects a mixture of water, sand and chemicals deep into the ground to release oil and gas—can harm nearby water supplies, more conclusive evidence is still needed to determine how dangerous the practice is. Chemicals range from the same benign ingredients found in everyday products like toothpaste and detergent, to cancer-causing substances like Benzene. Since frack wells often pass through aquifers, there’s a risk those chemicals could contaminate drinking water, and because of drilling-related emissions, many fracking-intensive areas suffer levels of air pollution that exceed federal standards.

Thanks to the trade secrets loophole, hundreds of chemicals remained off the public record. To qualify, companies needed to apply for a permit from the Wyoming Oil and Gas Commission. The regulators would then evaluate the companies’ claims that revealing those chemicals would hurt their competitive advantage in the industry. The amount of money spent in developing the product, and how easily other companies could copy it, were among the criteria the commission used to evaluate petitions for trade secrets.

But critics were concerned that the commission was doling out permits without rigorous evaluation. “They were handing out exemptions left, right and center,” said Katherine O’Brien, a lawyer for the nonprofit law firm, Earthjustice.

Many Wyoming landowners also criticized the fact that the exemptions made it difficult to do groundwater testing on their own land—a precaution an increasing number of citizens are taking in order to track changes in their local water sources. Since landowners aren’t able to do blanket tests for all chemicals, the tests have to be primed to look for a specific chemical. When oil and gas companies didn’t disclose what chemicals they were using, landowners were left in the dark about potential health or environmental risks from drilling operations nearby. New rules prompted by the recent settlement may help solve this problem.

Currently, the commission has no written policies or formal standards for how to evaluate trade secrets claims, though Mark Watson, the supervisor for the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, pointed out that Wyoming is one of the only states that requires companies to submit a list of the chemicals they use to state regulators. Some companies fear that making that information available would allow competitors to reverse engineer their products (a fear that fracking critics say is like a food company claiming that labeling requirements threaten their business). In Texas and North Dakota, companies are only required to list chemicals on the industry-run website, fracfocus.com. Colorado also makes companies use fracfocus, but goes a step further by requiring them to list not only the chemicals, but also their concentrations.

Under the terms of the settlement, the commission must adopt stricter standards for evaluating industry claims to keep certain chemicals hidden under the trade secrets exemption.Whether or not those new standards have a big impact will depend on how rigorously and faithfully the commission implements them. For starters, companies will have to re-apply for the trade secrets exemptions granted to the 128 chemicals listed in the lawsuit.

O’Brien sees the settlement as part of growing trend towards full disclosure. Last year, for instance, Texas energy giant, Baker Hughes, began listing 100 percent of its chemicals. “It’s a snowball effect,” she said. “Once one company does it, it becomes harder and harder for other companies to maintain that trade secrets are necessary for their survival.”

Correction: And earlier version of this story indicated that the new standards had not yet been written, when in fact, they have been written and have yet to be implemented.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryWyomingOilNatural GasPollutionPublic health2015/02/11 02:10:00 GMT-7ArticleIs altitude causing suicide in the West?https://www.hcn.org/articles/is-altitude-causing-suicide-in-the-west
Researchers find that high elevations may affect our emotions in both good and bad waysThe West’s mountain towns, from Jackson to Taos, Silverton to Park City, Truckee to Ketchum, tend to float to the top of what I’ll call Listicles of Happiness: Those inane rankings of the “best towns” in the nation, whether it’s the best small towns, the best ski towns or, a recent favorite to hate, “20 Colorado Mountain Towns That Are Paradise in Winter,” the writers of which have some fetish for stoplights, or the lack thereof. Judging from these lists, we mountain townies are a joyous bunch, working high-paying jobs that not only allow us to follow our passion, but also to go fly fishing on our lunch break, mountain bike after that (without stoplights to slow us down!), and then, fueled by a runner’s high, party long into the night.

But there’s another set of lists, too, that aren’t published by the usual magazines or websites, but on which those very same mountain towns and states tend to rank highly: The Lists of Misery. Western states are among the national leaders in alcohol abuse and depression rates, and rank low for mental health. A few days ago, the Centers for Disease Control — the usual compilers of the Lists of Misery — put out a report on alcohol-related poisoning fatalities. The Interior West had the highest rates, by far. Then there’s the ultimate List of Misery, suicide rates, which the Interior West has long topped, earning the Rocky Mountain states the morbid moniker of The Suicide Belt.

Suicide rates are far higher in the Interior West than in the rest of the nation.

The root causes of this mountain misery have remained a mystery. Maybe we kill ourselves at a higher rate because we have so many guns at our disposal, and maybe we reach that extreme of misery because we are physically and emotionally isolated: We not only live further apart from one another, but our independent Western spirit prevents us from seeking help and support. Maybe the notion of driving over mountain passes for mental health care is too daunting.

But a group of researchers think they may have found the reason the mountain states top not only the Lists of Misery, but maybe also the Listicles of Happiness: high altitude. Two studies, each by an overlapping group of scientists looking into the matter, were published back in 2010 and 2011. The findings didn’t get a lot of play at the time. But after CDC released its latest data, for 2012, showing that the suicide rate has been increasing nationwide, particularly in Western states like Utah and Colorado, and after an article on the altitude findings was published at Science.Mic in November, the theory attracted more attention.

In the paper “Positive Association between Altitude and Suicide in 2584 U.S. Counties” published in 2011 in High Altitude Medicine and Biology, the authors looked at every county in the U.S., and found a strong positive correlation between the average altitude of the county and the suicide rate. Counties that lie below 2,000 feet above sea level had an overall suicide rate that was about half that of counties lying between 4,000 and 5,000 feet in altitude. Counties above 9,000 feet had the highest suicide rate. And so on. This in spite of the fact that high altitude counties generally have a lower mortality rate from all other causes. The authors note:

Prior reports of increased suicides in the U.S. Mountain Region have prompted speculation that the excess is owing to greater access to firearms, increased isolation, or reduced income. Even after controlling for these variables in our analysis, the positive correlation between altitude and suicide still exists, which suggests that the increased suicide rate in the regions with greatest altitude, such as the Mountain Region, may be owing to, at least in part, its altitude per se.

How could altitude lead someone to end their own life? Possibly through hypoxia, or lack of adequate oxygen to the brain, the phenomenon that causes us to get dizzy, or drunk faster, at high altitude. “Altitude is a well-known cause of hypoxia,” the authors say, “and the greater the elevation, the greater the hypoxia. Chronic hypoxia also is thought to increase mood disturbances, especially in patients with emotional instability.” The authors go on to admit that hypoxia’s effect on mood is complex, and more study is needed.

One of the researchers, at least, has continued that study, and thinks he’s closer to solving the mystery. In the Science.Mic article, writer Theresa Fisher spoke with Utah neuroscientist Perry Renshaw about his findings. Renshaw told her that he believes altitude messes with our bodies’ levels of dopamine and serotonin, chemicals that regulate our sense of happiness. Hypoxia, he says, causes serotonin to go down in our brains (which usually results in depression) and dopamine to increase (which usually creates a sense of euphoria, e.g. “runner’s high”).

Whether this conflicting combination of effects makes us happy or makes us sad depends on the makeup of our brains. Folks with a history of depression are more likely to get more depressed if they move to the mountains, as are women, according to the Science.Mic article. And people who are naturally happy are likely to get downright ecstatic at higher altitudes. And that would explain how so many mountain towns can top both the Listicles of Happiness and the Lists of Misery.

When I first caught wind of the theory a few months ago, it seemed absurd. I’ve lived all but one year of my life between 5,000 and 9,300 feet. Looking back at those times — as well as the year I spent at sea level — I don’t see any correlations between my mental health and the altitude at which I was living. Sure, my sanity often wore a little thin while living in Silverton, Colorado, at 9,300 feet, but then there were many other factors aside from altitude to consider: A tiny populace, psychotic politics, a treacherous drive to the nearest movie theatre and, yeah, I was running the town newspaper, a sure road to mental illness.

Having said all of that, suicide has been a shockingly common cause of death in Silverton since the heydays of mining, and many of its current residents — the ones who aren’t fighting over at Town Hall — can tend to get wrapped up in a sort of hypoxic euphoria. I always thought it was the scenery. Perhaps it’s the altitude.

]]>No publisherPublic healthColoradoUtahNew MexicoCommunities2015/01/14 11:55:00 GMT-7ArticleThe Latest: A new tactic to quell Owen’s Valley dusthttps://www.hcn.org/issues/46.21/the-latest-a-new-tactic-to-quell-owens-valley-dust
Los Angeles tries to save water and mitigate effects of sucking the valley dry. BACKSTORYIn the early 1900s, the rapidly growing city of Los Angeles sent agents posing as farmers to the Owens Valley, 200 miles away, to buy up land and water rights. L.A. then diverted the water south, transforming the once vast Owens Lake into a dust-choked plain. The water grab, immortalized in the 1974 movie Chinatown, helped cement L..A.’s reputation as an environmental villain. Current Mayor Eric Garcetti, however, is trying to green up its reputation (“Brave new L.A.,” HCN, 1/24/14).

FOLLOWUPIn mid-November, L.A. attempted to atone for past environmental sins by finding a new way to alleviate the asthma-causing dust storms that plague the Owens Valley. For 20 years, the city flooded the 110-square-mile lakebed with hundreds of thousands of gallons of water simply to tame the dust. Now, the city says it will use tractors to turn the moist lakebed clay into furrows and basketball-sized dirt clods — bottling up the dust for years while saving enough water to supply 150,000 Los Angeles residents annually.

]]>No publisherLatestWaterCaliforniaPublic health2014/12/08 04:00:00 GMT-7ArticleThe Uintah Basin's tricky oil and gas ozone problemhttps://www.hcn.org/articles/officials-chisel-away-at-the-uintah-basins-tricky-ozone-problem
Can officials greenlight booming development and clean up the air at the same time?On a crisp fall day lined with cottonwoods yellow-bright as balls of flame, I take a gravel shortcut from Utah’s Nine Mile Canyon toward Vernal, an energy boomtown of some 10,000 souls. Though I’ve spent the day looking at natural gas wells going in along the fingers of the plateau that cradles Nine Mile’s storied rock art, I’m surprised by what I encounter shortly after hitting asphalt, popping up around each curve in time to Phil Collins crooning a Supremes cover on the radio: Pumpjacks. Everywhere.

You can't hurry love No you'll just have to wait

Two tall as buildings nod up on the right.

She said love don't come easy It's a game of give and take

Two more nod down the left. Then another two.

How long must I wait How much more must I take

A prickling of several more on the mesa tops, and then

Before loneliness Will cause my heart, heart to break?

the broad dome of dry-grass desert opens up to reveal a vista that is anything but lonely: Densely spaced oil wells and clustered tanks spread to the horizons. When I pull over and climb onto the shoulder, I can feel a vibration deep in my chest – hundreds of pumpjack engines rattling with flatulent backfires like impolite party guests.

If it were a cold, still day with snow carpeting the ground, there would likely be a lungful of nasty air to accompany this chorus, and a much hazier view. That's because wintertime inversions occasionally close over the Uintah Basin like a giant Tupperware lid, sealing in pollutants from its more than 10,000 active oil and gas wells, associated truck traffic, drilling rigs and waste disposal facilities, and help facilitate a chemical reaction that produces ozone levels that rival those found in urban Los Angeles. In Vernal last winter, monitors recorded ozone levels exceeding national standards on 22 days, and in neighboring Roosevelt, 29 days, with episodes ranging from three to 15 days in length. The gas can harm lungs, and exacerbate existing respiratory and cardiac ailments. And though the valley’s population is small enough that it’s difficult to definitively demonstrate local health impacts, levels are certainly high enough to produce them. Utah health officials are currently looking into whether the area has a higher-than-normal infant mortality rate, after a local midwife found an increase in deaths based on obituary records.

As part of a collaboration between the state, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Bureau of Land Management and several academic institutions, researchers are zeroing in on the specific chemistry and sources of those emissions in hopes of decreasing them. One study published in Nature on October 1 traced local ozone formation back primarily to volatile organic compounds (or VOCs), some 97 percent of which are released by industry activity – a difference from ozone in urban areas, where nitrogen oxides play more of a role. Scientists using a mobile laboratory, meanwhile, recently published findings that individual well pads are likely responsible for the bulk of Uintah Basin emissions, particularly via holding tanks, as well as equipment that separates liquid fuels or water from natural gas.

State and federal officials are already working to tackle some of these sources; the Environmental Protection Agency in 2012 finalized new source performance standards (since updated twice) – to be fully implemented next year – that should cut VOC emissions from new wells by 95 percent. And last month, Utah enacted rules that apply to existing infrastructure as well. These require ongoing maintenance of pollution controls; replacing pneumatic controllers on holding tanks – which allow gases to vent directly into the atmosphere whenever pressure builds enough – with low- or no-bleed valves; putting autoigniters on flares so that they don’t, in the event of extinguishing, release unburned hydrocarbons into the mix; and bottom-filling instead of splash-filling tanker trucks, which will cut those emissions 50 to 60 percent.

Since much of the pollution likely flows from older equipment and practices, says Utah Department of Environmental Quality Deputy Division Director Brock LeBaron, those changes could produce marked improvements, even as new development marches onward. To help ensure compliance, the state has also doubled the number of inspectors working the basin from two to four, and although that still puts each site on an inspection cycle of two to three years, he argues, their presence and visibility should encourage producers to fall in line.

The Bureau of Land Management, meanwhile, increasingly demands pollution controls from companies proposing to develop on public land, says the agency’s Utah air quality specialist, Leonard Herr, such as pipelines to reduce truck traffic, centralized facilities to make emissions capture easier and relying on electricity instead of engines to power field infrastructure. The agency is also heading up a basin-wide air-quality modeling effort to guide future decisions about development. “It’s too early to make definitive statements” about results, says Herr. “More wells are being drilled, but ozone is not going up. That said, it’s not going down either.”

"We might be allowing construction of something so gargantuan that it’s impossible to keep emissions in check. Sealing all the possible leaks in the system might be physically and logistically impossible.”

Such efforts are steps in the right direction, says Jeremy Nichols of the environmental group WildEarth Guardians, which sued the EPA over its decision not to designate the Uintah Basin a nonattainment zone in hopes of ushering in a mandated and much stricter ozone reduction plan. But their success will depend in part on how the EPA and the Ute tribe decide to further regulate oil and gas development on neighboring Indian Country, which accounts for a large portion of emissions.

And “ultimately,” given the 30,000 or so new wells expected in the Uintah Basin, he adds, “it’s an issue of scale. The traditional thinking is that you can always slap on a control. But at the end of the day we might be allowing construction of something so gargantuan that it’s impossible to keep emissions in check in a way that really protects public health. Sealing all the possible leaks in the system might be physically and logistically impossible.”

Indeed, the BLM's most recent report from its modeling effort found that simply controlling VOC pollution from all condensate tanks and dehydrators -- both major sources -- will result in only small cuts to ozone levels from foreseeable oil and gas development by 2021, and still fail to meet federal health standards. And by the end of this year, the EPA is expected to float a proposal to make those standards significantly tighter.

“That’s going to make the hurdle tougher,” says LeBaron. “But we know which direction we need to go, and we’re going to keep plowing away.”

Some of the new state and BLM rules already go farther than the BLM has had a chance to model says Herr, but additional measures are likely to be necessary. Depending on what the cooperating agencies involved decide, that could mean adding controls to a broader array of equipment and strengthening and expanding inspection and maintenance programs -- which, he says, might be enough. And if not, seasonal restrictions, an emissions budget with a set cap on pollution or even reducing future development could come into play. But whatever the mechanism, “I have complete confidence that the Uintah Basin’s ozone problems are solvable. We have a great track record in this country. Compare 1950s air quality issues to now. Lead? A nonissue. Carbon monoxide? Solved pretty much everywhere.” And none of those efforts crippled local economies, he points out.

But don’t hold your breath that the resolution of local pollution will be speedy (or, actually, maybe you should … benzene, one of the VOCs involved, is a potent carcinogen at high levels). As the Supremes so sagely noted about love, it’s pretty difficult to hurry regulatory mechanisms that involve multiple jurisdictions and an economic powerhouse of an industry. “Let’s get the ozone down now and not wait through the years and years that nonattainment planning takes,” says LeBaron. “I’ll be dead before that process wraps up. Seriously.”

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryOilNatural GasUtahPollutionU.S. Environmental Protection AgencyPublic healthPublic Lands2014/11/03 20:30:00 GMT-7ArticleWill Wyoming companies get higher fines for workplace deaths?https://www.hcn.org/articles/lawmaker-time-to-consider-stiffer-osha-penalties
When a worker died on the job, the company paid a $6,700 penalty, inciting new discussion on the issue.

Brett Samuel Collins, 20, was working his last few days at a construction job near Sheridan before heading back to college classes when a trackhoe bucket struck him in the head. He died Aug. 20, 2012.

“He was finally settling down and thinking school was the answer,” said his grandmother, Mary Jane Collins, of Sheridan. Up to that point, Brett Collins had worked several seasons for the U.S. Forest Service, requiring him to miss fall semesters. He’d attended two spring semesters at Sheridan College. “The construction company job was so he could go to school for the whole year,” Mary Jane Collins said.

Workers use a scissor lift in the construction of a new shop east of Casper. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)

The employer, COP Wyoming LLC, initially received five citations related to the accident that caused Brett Collins’ death. Two citations were dismissed, and the Wyoming Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) proposed $13,860 in fines for the remaining three. About a year later, the company and Wyoming OSHA settled on a much smaller fine; $6,773.

For the Collins family, the fine was an insult. They began to ask how a $6,773 fine was supposed to motivate companies to avoid violating critical workplace safety regulations.

“I find it offensive that lawyers and company representatives can negotiate and reduce fines to that small of an amount,” especially when OSHA violations involved a fatality, Mary Jane Collins told WyoFile in a recent interview.

Mary Jane Collins said she and the rest of Brett’s family in the Sheridan area began looking into the issue, and pushing for tougher consequences for OSHA violators. In September, Mary Jane Collins testified before the Joint Labor, Health and Social Services Interim Committee, proposing a straight-forward change: set a non-negotiable $50,000 fine for companies in violation of Wyoming OSHA regulations involving a workplace fatality. The proposal is not intended to put anybody out of business, Mary Jane said, but to put employers on notice; you’ll get hit in the pocketbook if violating OSHA regulations results in fatality.

“A fatality is a fatality and you cannot negotiate that,” Collins told WyoFile. “It’s pretty offensive when you can put Brett and his 20-year-old happy-go-lucky smiling face next to a $6,000 fine. Come on. It just doesn’t seem real or right.”

Members of the Labor Committee said they’d take the proposal under consideration. The committee meets again Oct. 16-17, but no agenda has been publicized.

“There will be more discussion at the next meeting,” said Labor Committee member Rep. Mary Throne (D-Cheyenne).

Brett Samuel Collins was killed on the job in August 2012. (Photo courtesy of the Collins family)

Throne sponsored a bill in 2010 that would have raised OSHA penalties, but it didn’t gain traction in the Legislature, despite support from groups that included the oil and gas industry. So are Wyoming lawmakers prepared to add more “stick” to what has been a mostly “carrot” approach to incentivize safer workplaces?

Lawmakers may be warming to the idea, Throne said, certainly the ones on the Labor Committee.

“It’s just offensive to people when a family member dies and the penalty is so low,” Throne told WyoFile in a recent phone interview. “The frustration I’ve had … is it’s time to stop just expressing sympathy and time to do something.”

Wyoming’s struggle with workplace safety

By far, the biggest contributing factor to deaths on the job in Wyoming is vehicle accidents — particularly accidents in which seatbelts are not used. Wyoming’s remote work locations, travel, construction and the nature of working around heavy machinery are all contributing factors to the state’s high rate of workplace fatalities.

For a 10-year period during boom times in the 2000s, Wyoming ranked worst, or close to worst in the nation for the number of workplace deaths per 100,000 workers.

In December 2011, after 16 months on the job as Wyoming’s workplace safety epidemiologist, Timothy Ryan submitted a report to the governor’s office and resigned due to his concern that there was not a serious enough commitment to address the carnage happening to Wyoming workers. After analyzing the scope of the problem and Wyoming’s efforts to address it, Ryan concluded, “Safety occurs as an afterthought.”

Both industry and Wyoming’s government have taken measures to improve workplace safety performance:

° The Legislature appropriated $500,000 for a grant program available to employers who want to establish or improve their own safety programs.

° Industry safety alliances: The Wyoming Oil and Gas Safety Alliance (WOGISA) was formed in 2010, “to promote safety and health improvement for the oil and gas exploration, production, transmission and refining industries in Wyoming.” Since, several other industries have partnered to improve safety performance in their respective fields, such as the Wyoming Refinery Safety Alliance, the Wyoming Transportation Safety Coalition, and the Wyoming Construction Safety Alliance.

Workplace fatalities in the state peaked in 2007 at 17 per 100,000 workers — four times the national average, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. There were 21 workplace fatalities in Wyoming in 2013, down from 31 deaths in 2012, according to the state.

The statistics regarding workplace fatalities seem to be trending in the right direction. But whether the state’s efforts — and industry’s — are to credit is difficult to say for certain, according to state officials. It’s also difficult to know to what extent recent safety improvement efforts have helped in regard to injuries.

Claims decreased from more than 16,000 per year in 2006 to about 12,000 in 2013, according to the Workforce Services Department Epidemiology Report for 2013 (download thereport). Hospitalizations dropped from more than 1,000 per year to 280 in 2013, the report says.

In the report, Wyoming Occupational Epidemiologist Mack Sewell wrote, “This drop could be related to a combination of events such as improvements in workers’ safety and changes in healthcare delivery with more medical care being delivered in outpatient settings.”

According to a recent Casper Star-Tribune article, Wyoming OSHA has struggled to maintain compliance officers, competing for talent with steady growth in construction and energy development.

Wyoming Department of Workforce Services Director Joan Evans said there’s been high turnover in Wyoming OSHA’s inspection and compliance office “due to salary competition.” She noted that Wyoming OSHA just shifted from three to two vacancies in compliance and inspection positions.

“We’re still ahead of the game. We’ve been able to do more and more consultations each year” since the new positions were added in 2012, Evans told WyoFile.

Wyoming OSHA conducted 158 consultations in 2011 (consultations are when an employer voluntarily asks Wyoming OSHA to review its safety program). There were 152 consultations in 2012, 605 in 2013, and 533 so far in 2014.

Incentives vs. mandates

Setting a non-negotiable fine, as the Collins family proposes, would require legislation and a signature from the governor, according to state officials. And there are challenges to the approach. “Non-negotiable” may be a legal non-starter. Even a parking ticket comes with the opportunity for due-process, say some worker advocates close to the issue. An alternate approach may be to raise minimum fine limits for serious OSHA violations.

“This is how we addressed the drunk driving issue,” said Dan Neal, executive director of the Equality State Policy Center, a nonprofit government watchdog group that represents several organizations, including some labor unions.

Wyoming Workforce Development spokeswoman Hayley McKee said, “OSHA has the authority to fine based on violations of the standards found, not the outcome of the violations.”

Throne said she expects the Labor Committee to discuss raising both the minimum and maximum OSHA fine limits when it meets later this month in Evanston. “You have to have the incentives, but you also have to have a meaningful deterrent,” Throne said.

Mary Jane Collins said that Wyoming’s voluntary incentives approach to date seems to show the state is looking out for employers before looking out for workers. “What they’re doing is helping the companies, not necessarily the workers,” Collins said. “When you hit somebody in the pocketbook you wake them up.”

— Dustin Bleizeffer is WyoFile editor-in-chief. He has covered energy and natural resource issues in Wyoming for 15 years. You can reach him at (307) 267-3327 or email dustin@wyofile.com. Follow Dustin on Twitter at @DBleizeffer

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryWyomingPublic healthOil2014/10/08 03:35:00 GMT-6ArticleDon’t drink the waterhttps://www.hcn.org/articles/dont-drink-the-water
Portland’s fluoridation battle shows how tricky it is to integrate science into debates that have as much to do with values as policy.Late one night last April, a teenager had to piss. By itself, this was not terribly newsworthy, but it became so when a security camera caught him unzipping his fly and leaning against the wrought iron fence that surrounds Reservoir #5 on Mount Tabor, in Portland, Oregon.

In response, the city water bureau decided to flush all 38 million gallons from the reservoir. “Our customers don’t anticipate drinking water that’s been contaminated by some yahoo,” a spokesman told the Associated Press. It was a question more of optics than science. A few ounces of urine in so much water posed little threat to anyone’s health.

To Alejandro Queral, though, it was also a question of politics. One of the most liberal cities in the country was showing that selectively drawing on science to support a conclusion that contradicts what the scientific community accepts is not the exclusive province of extreme conservatives. “Portlanders can get pretty crazy about their water,” he says. And he would know.

In September 2012, the Portland City Council voted 5-0 to add fluoride to the city’s drinking water starting the following March. Many thought the move was long overdue: Portland is the largest U.S. city that doesn’t fluoridate its water, and while voters had rejected fluoridation three times since 1956, the council was confident this time would be different. But they were wrong. A local group calling itself Clean Water Portland filed paperwork almost immediately to put the decision to a referendum in a special election that May.

At the time, Queral was a program officer for the Northwest Health Foundation, a nonprofit that works on health issues in Oregon and southwest Washington. A native of Mexico, he has advanced degrees in law and ecology. “I studied water snakes,” he tells me in a Portland coffee shop, grinning through his black beard. He sits on both the Public Health Advisory Board and the Oregon Environmental Council, and when the referendum went forward, he was asked to co-chair the group Healthy Kids, Healthy Portland, which supported fluoridation.

A protester struggles with a security officer during a City Council vote on whether to add fluoride to city water in Portland, Ore. The City Council approved a plan to add fluoride to Portland's water in Sept. 2012, but fluoridation was later voted down in a referendum the following May. Don Ryan/AP Photo

Set against him was Clean Water Portland’s Kim Kaminski. She is pleasant and soft-spoken but with a steely edge. Like Queral, she has a law degree. She grew up in Illinois with fluoridated water and had no problem with it, other than that she still seemed to get a lot of cavities. But by 2012, her feelings had evolved. She and her allies launched an attack dazzling in its variety. They pointed out that the proposed additive, hydrosilicofluoride, was a byproduct of pesticide production, and that a factsheet from the National Sanitation Foundation showed detectable levels of arsenic (43 percent of samples) and lead (2 percent) in hydrosilicofluoride-treated water. A 500-plus-page brick of a report from the National Academy of Sciences raised questions about whether high levels of fluoride led to a dental condition called fluorosis, caused brittle bones or even certain types of cancer, and perhaps lowered intelligence in children.

It was, in a way, a battle for the Rose City’s uniquely liberal-libertarian soul. Portlanders take pride in the cleanliness of their Bull Run watershed, and here, Kaminski thought, were the city fathers making backroom deals to fill it with chemicals. She and her allies framed fluoridation as a matter of personal choice, or its lack; to embrace it was akin to allowing the government to forcibly medicate you. “We live in a creative city. We could do better than just pouring chemicals into our water,” she says, in what would become the battle hymn of the fluoride foes.

Assertion for assertion, Healthy Kids, Healthy Portland challenged Clean Water Portland, listing all the big medical organizations that endorsed fluoridation, including every surgeon general and U.S. president since Kennedy. The group noted Oregon’s spotty dental health statistics: It is 48th in the nation in residents having access to fluoridated water. Nearly two-thirds of Portland’s third-graders show signs of tooth decay, and many of them come from the city’s less-affluent minority communities.

It wasn’t enough. Queral was unprepared for the campaign’s heat. “It was never explicitly personal, but there was a lot of underlying nastiness. Typical Portland,” he says, as two coffee-shop patrons shoot him dirty looks. He watched in dismay as the numbers in support of fluoridation declined from over half, to half, to under half, and on down. When the election arrived, fluoridation was pummeled, 61-39 percent.

Water fluoridation began in the 1940s. Back in the early 1900s, Colorado Springs dentist Floyd McKay noticed that many of his patients’ teeth were mottled, a condition called “Colorado Brown Teeth.” But their teeth were also unusually strong. McKay linked their lack of cavities to naturally high levels of fluoride in local drinking water.

In 1945, the U.S. Public Health Service began its own ambitious experiment. In four metropolitan areas, one community’s water was supplemented with fluoride, and another’s was not. The study was supposed to last 10 years, but produced dramatic results after just five: The incidence of cavities had declined more than 50 percent in those communities with fluoridated water.

Supplementation programs sprang up across the country. As of 2010, close to 75 percent of U.S. citizens drank fluoridated water (and, as Queral has pointed out, “no one’s head has exploded or anything”). Very little is needed to have a significant effect; the current standard is 0.7 milligrams per liter. The number of cavities has dropped, and in 1999, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention listed water fluoridation as one of the 20th century’s top 10 advances in public health, along with vaccination, seat belts and the recognition of tobacco’s harmful effects.

As fluoride use spread, resistance against it hardened. Objections ranged from its efficacy to its role as a form of socialized medicine and government intrusion. (The John Birch Society called it a communist plot.) Nearly three-quarters of Americans may drink fluoridated water, and it might seem strange to have to adjudicate something that has been around nearly unchanged for more than 60 years, but ever since 1950, when fluoridation comes on the ballot, it loses nearly 60 percent of the time.

The idea of political conservatives dismissing Science (in its capitalized, deified form) when it suits ideology, particularly when it comes to climate change and evolution, is a familiar media trope. The left, however, has hardly covered itself in glory with some liberals’ attitudes toward vaccinations, homeopathy and other issues. In Portland, in fact, fluoridation opponents employed many of the methods more commonly associated with the right.

“Their goal was to destabilize the science,” says Philip Wu, a pediatrician who participated in several forums as a pro-fluoride expert. It hardly mattered, he says, that almost every objection could be contextualized. (The authors of the National Academy of Sciences report explicitly said their work had nothing to do with water fluoridation; the arsenic and lead detected in water samples occurred at levels far below what the Environmental Protection Agency considered unsafe.)

But Kaminski and her supporters, though they prided themselves on their skepticism, didn’t see themselves as anti-science. Rather, they considered themselves diligent if amateur students of science, who saw their lack of expertise as an advantage. “My one credential,” Kaminski says, “was that I know how to read.” When she first encountered fluoridation as an issue in 2005, she dove into the literature and saw a lot of things that scared her not only as a citizen, but also as a mother. “The new science raises questions,” she says. “That’s why it’s best to be cautious. You err on the side of uncertainty.”

For Wu, that attitude shows how a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. A single study suggests that something might be rotten in the state of fluoride. Fair enough. But one study is only one study. It can and should spur further investigation but, as a study, its reach should be limited. “It can’t lead to grand conclusions,” he says. “That’s the way science works.”

However, he notes ruefully, that is not how politics work. “Once the other side had introduced doubt, that opened the door to talk about other sets of values,” he says. “Not values that say science is bad, but values that perhaps supersede science.” Fluoridation ran into a city that loved the idea of a pristine watershed remaining pristine, that resented being condescended to by a bunch of medical and dental organizations, and was confident in its ability to think for itself. More broadly, the assurances of science can seem abstract if a person wants to protect himself or his family, no matter how miniscule the risk actually is. The difficulties your own child may face are a tragedy; the benefits to thousands of other kids, a statistic. “When the council just rammed it through, a lot of people were like, ‘Let’s take a step back and think about it,’ ” Kaminski says. “Even people who might have supported it under other circumstances.”

In hindsight, Queral feels, fluoride advocates should have spent more time doing groundwork. “I would have spent a lot longer educating people, like two years,” he says. “You explain the nature of the problem, explain who is most at risk, and then talk about what fluoridation does to solve that problem.” He shrugs, pained. “Who knows? Maybe we’ll do better next time.”

Soon after the election, Queral left the Northwest Health Foundation. He now directs the local chapter of the United Way, working on childhood poverty issues. The job has other attractions as well: “It’s nice to be behind the scenes.”

Kaminski, meanwhile, is still in the thick of things. On the day I meet her in northeast Portland, she is carrying three petitions: one for a women’s equal rights amendment, one for a measure on the labeling of GMOs, and the last for the formation of a people’s water trust. She is excited to support the water trust, which will ensure that no one gets blindsided by the city council and its social engineering experiments ever again. (It will eventually fail to get enough signatures, showing that Portlanders’ love for enlightened contrarianism has its limits.)

Today, though, her focus is on the GMO labeling measure. For her it’s a no-brainer, but she says she knows she’s facing an opponent skilled in the art of deception and obfuscation. Similar measures have been defeated in both California and Washington — places she would have thought they had a good shot. That just shows the power of the GMO interests, she says, and is a reminder that everyone needs to stay on their toes. “Those guys go in and create a seed of doubt that they can exploit,” she says. “And they’re very good at it.”

]]>No publisherWaterPoliticsCommunitiesNorthwestOregonPublic health2014/10/07 05:05:00 GMT-6ArticleMore pesticides are permeating urban streamshttps://www.hcn.org/articles/rural-rivers-get-cleaner-urban-streams-are-full-of-pesticides
But rural rivers are getting cleaner, a new study says. If you live in a city, the U.S. Geological Survey has some bad news for you: There’s a good chance your water is contaminated. A USGS study released earlier this month monitored more than 200 streams from 1992 to 2011 and found that the number of urban waterways contaminated with pesticides increased from 53 percent in the 1990s to 90 percent the following decade. Most pollutants were found at levels only harmful to aquatic life like fish, frogs and insects, while the number of streams with contaminant levels that pose a risk to human health actually dropped. Yet new chemicals are still permeating the environment and our understanding of their negative effects is limited.

Still, the USGS study is the country’s most comprehensive assessment of water quality to date, and it does offer some good news — or at least, what passes for good news on the environmental beat. For one thing, farmers are doing a better job at reducing runoff: The number of agricultural rivers with pollutants exceeding aquatic life benchmarks decreased from 69 percent to 61 percent, while pollution in mixed-use streams stayed about the same.

The study also demonstrates how effective federal regulators can be at reducing pollutants — and how slow they are to catch up with real-world conditions. Diazinon, for example, a commonly used pesticide in the ‘90s that’s toxic to bees and birds, was phased out of residential use by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2004. Levels in waterways have since dropped dramatically. Yet for each toxin removed, dozens more are added: Even as the EPA was phasing out diazinon, a new pesticide called fipronil — classified as a “possible human carcinogen” — began showing up in high concentrations in urban streams, apparently in runoff from gardeners.

USGS National Water Quality Assessment Program

Altogether, some 15,000 new chemical compounds identified in patents and academic literature are added to the federal database of the American Chemical Society every day, and the “EPA simply cannot keep pace,” writes Jerald L. Schnoor, editor-in-chief of the society’s Environmental Science and Technology journal. “Their budget is in decline and the list grows exponentially.”

The EPA isn’t the only federal agency that can’t keep pace. Due to “resource constraints,” the USGS study was only able to monitor about half of the 400 herbicides and pesticides widely used in U.S. agriculture, meaning that serious pesticides like neonicotinoids — linked to widespread bee decline and banned in Europe — weren’t included in water quality assessments. Nor were unregulated chemicals used by oil and gas companies.

Plus, even as the public health organization NSF International recently found that 87 percent of Americans are concerned about trace pesticides in their water and the USGS report credited the reduction of pesticide pollution to EPA regulations, the U.S. House of Representatives is quietly working to reduce the EPA’s ability to regulate stream pollution. On July 31, the House passed Ohio Republican Bob Gibbs’ “Reducing Regulatory Burdens Act,” which would allow regulated pesticides to be dumped into navigable waterways without a permit. On Sept. 11, it followed suit with Florida Republican Steve Southerland’s “Waters of the United States Regulatory Overreach Protection Act,” which would exempt seasonal streams and some tributaries from Clean Water Act protections. Both bills stalled in the Senate.

USGS Pesticide National Synthesis Project

EPA regulations led to a vast decrease in the use of diazinon, toxic to birds and bees, over two decades.

Krista Langlois is an editorial fellow at High Country News. She tweets @KristaLanglois2.

]]>No publisherWaterU.S. Environmental Protection AgencyPollutionPublic healthNew Research2014/09/30 09:40:00 GMT-6ArticleWhat diabetic grizzlies can tell us about human obesityhttps://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/a-taste-of-the-grizzlys-own-medicine
Most researchers studying grizzly bears are from U.S. Fish and Wildlife or university ecology departments, not biotechnology companies. Still, Kevin Corbit, a senior scientist at the Southern California biotech firm Amgen, spends his days in a lab in Pullman, Washington, analyzing bear blood. He leaves the actual touching of the 700-pound predator to the capable handlers and their trusty anesthesia. Corbit chuckles as he reflects on his work: “I guess it’s not logical to study bears with a biotech job.”

Maybe it is logical, though, judging from a study he recently published, in collaboration with Washington State University’s Bear Center. With the goal of developing a better long-term treatment for human obesity, Corbit strayed from the status quo of testing mice and rats, which aren’t great predictors of human response. Instead of trying medications on rodents, he decided to examine the genetics of grizzlies and their metabolism. The bears were the perfect fit; before hibernating each year, they become extraordinarily obese.

A grizzly roams in Yellowstone National Park. Photo by Flickr user, Shane Lin.

In the new study, Corbit and his colleagues discovered a natural state of diabetes in bears that not only serves a real biological purpose, but also is reversible. The bears’ bodies effectively turn up or down their responsiveness to the hormone insulin—much, Corbit says, “like a dimmer switch.” The bears are at their fattest in the late summer, sometimes consuming more than 50,000 calories and gaining up to 16 pounds in a day. But despite the weight gain, they’re at their least diabetic. Their insulin dial is turned up, which helps them store fat for seven months of hibernation.

When the bear hibernates and needs to live off its fat stores, it turns its insulin responsiveness way down. The animal becomes, in human terms, like a Type 2 diabetic, and insulin-resistant. And yet, the bear is actually losing, rather than gaining, weight. Year in, year out, despite the extremes of fall gorging, then foodlessness for the entire winter, the bear’s blood sugar remains consistent. It stays healthy thanks to PTEN, a unique genetic mutation (that appears in only some humans) that allows for the insulin dimmer switch.----

In addition to pointing out that diabetes is a natural and temporary condition for grizzlies, the research shows that the dominant theory that human obesity and diabetes go hand-in-hand may need rethinking. Corbit is already thinking about what this could mean for how people are currently treated for the condition. “I worry that giving people insulin over the long-term may end up hurting them,” he says. While injecting insulin in the bloodstream can bring down high blood sugar, it also prevents the breakdown of fat, which leads to cardiovascular problems and other serious medical issues. An alternative treatment for obesity, Corbit thinks, could lie in discovering how exactly grizzlies use the PTEN gene to control their insulin levels.

Ultimately, Corbit wrote in a New York Times op-ed last winter, drug development could take a hint from “millions of years of evolutionary experimentation.” Through unique genetic mutations, animals have evolved in ways to overcome conditions that continue to afflict humans. The new grizzlies research is just one example of how we can learn from them.

“Nature has figured it out,” he says. Now he just needs to find a way to translate thousands of years of evolution into a treatment for obesity. Slumbering grizzlies may have brought Corbit closer than ever.

Wyatt Orme is an editorial intern at High Country News. He tweets @wyatt_orme.

]]>No publisherWildlifeBearsNew ResearchWashingtonPublic health2014/08/07 04:05:00 GMT-6ArticleWashington’s new clean-water plan is a mixed bag https://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/washingtons-new-clean-water-plan-is-a-mixed-bag
Washington’s governor last week announced a bold approach for creating cleaner, safer waters for fish and the people who eat them. Unless he didn’t.

Every day, the state’s Department of Health releases a map of waterways so polluted that restrictions are placed on the amount and types of fish people should eat. Washington has many troubled waterways, including the industrialized Duwamish River (“River of No Return,” HCN June 23, 2014). On the other side of the state, an entire section of the Spokane River has signs posted near its banks (and on the state map) warning: “Don’t eat any fish.”

Advisory from the Washington state health department.

The state has been under pressure recently from the federal Environmental Protection Agency to revise its fish consumption rate to better protect the health of people who eat locally caught fish. (The rate is a measurement of how much fish is being consumed, in order to help state officials decide how to regulate pollution accordingly. Until now, the rate has been out of date and misleadingly low.) The EPA, in turn, is being pressured thanks to a lawsuit filed last year by tribes and environmental groups, who argue that many Indians, immigrants and impoverished people eat far more fish than the state currently assumes.

Gov. Inslee agrees. “I gotta tell you, there are people who eat a lot of fish,” he said at his press conference last week. Inslee announced Washington would match Oregon with the most-protective “fish consumption rate” in the nation at 175 grams per day. The new rate assumes that each Washington resident, on average, consumes a six-ounce serving of locally caught fish per day, or a little more than 11 pounds a month, and that waterways must be clean enough that levels of pollutants like mercury or PCBs accumulating in fish won’t kill anyone. The current standard is based on an assumption of 6.5 grams per day, or a little more than five pounds in a year.

But moments after unveiling the higher consumption rate, Inslee proposed a tenfold weakening of the state’s water quality standards that protect against cancer risk. Amid criticism, Inslee insisted there’s “no backsliding” on water standards and that “there is no either-or between environmental and economic health.”

The regional head of the EPA appears to think the change is backsliding. “If Washington reduces the level of cancer risk protection … tribes, certain low-income, minority communities, and other high fish consuming groups could be provided less protection than they have now,” EPA’s Region 10 director Dennis McLerran wrote to a state senator just days before Inslee’s announcement. By increasing the fish consumption rate but rolling back the cancer risk assessment — two arcane calculations in the formula that sets water quality standards — "they are giving with one hand and taking away with the other," said Fran Wilshusen, habitat director for the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission.

The governor’s advisory team was surprised to discover there would indeed be less protection when crunching the numbers, said Kelly Susewind, special assistant to the director of the state Department of Ecology. Which is why, Susewind said, the rollback is a “hybrid” in which the standards are weakened across the board, but the department will not allow discharge (from industry or municipalities) of cancer-causing toxic at levels higher than presently permitted.

Critics of the cancer risk assessment change call it a concession to industry and municipal wastewater dischargers. The dischargers argue tougher clean water standards are prohibitively expensive and may even be unreachable with current technology. Boeing derailed former Gov. Christine Gregoire’s attempt at setting a higher fish consumption rate that may have catalyzed stricter pollution standards in 2012, according to documents obtained by the independent journalist group, InvestigateWest.

“Business is worried about the economic impact” of tougher water quality standards, Susewind said. “(Companies) are looking at investing on a 20- or 30-year schedule, and they ask, ‘How will I know that 10 years from now I (won’t) end up with a limit I can’t comply with?’” Susewind said. The governor’s plan, he said, allows business more certainty.

“So the good news is that nothing is getting worse?” asked Chris Wilke, executive director of Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, a nonprofit that’s been pushing for bigger improvements to water quality standards for years. “That’s not why we started this process,” Wilke said, referring to the quest for a more realistic (and higher) fish consumption rate that would require stricter water standards.

Wilshusen has been advocating for a more protective fish consumption rate since the mid-1990s. She praises Inslee for raising the rate, but said all the moving parts to the governor’s plan, including running it through the legislature next year before it’s actually implemented, make its success far from certain.

“It’s like when you were a kid and ordered something from the back of a comic book,” Wilshusen said. “And when the envelope comes in the mail, you open it and say, ‘Hey! It didn’t look like that.’”

After 25 years of work, she said, “What we got this week is disappointing.”

Kevin Taylor writes from Spokane, Washington, where he does not eat the fish.

]]>No publisherWaterFoodPublic healthWashingtonCoastNorthwestCommunitiesFishPollutionBlog Post2014/07/18 05:10:00 GMT-6ArticleThe politics of public healthhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/44.16/the-politics-of-public-health
Environmental regulations are a favorite target in the runup to this year's election.On August 28, Utah Congressional candidate Mia Love took the podium at the Republican National Convention to riff on "personal responsibility" and the convention's "We Built It" refrain -- a distortion of President Obama's words about how public infrastructure helps people run their businesses. Love didn't mention Tropical Storm Isaac, which a few days before had killed 29 in her parents' native Haiti and was now a hurricane bearing down on the Gulf Coast. The omission was awkward, for the storm was busily demonstrating Obama's point. As privately built levees gave out in nearby Plaquemines Parish, a brand-new $14 billion federal levee system saved New Orleans from a storm surge rivaling Katrina's.

The distance between rhetoric and reality yawned even wider the next day, when Vice Presidential pick Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., declared that, "The greatest of all responsibilities is that of the strong to protect the weak. The truest measure of any society is how it treats those who cannot defend or care for themselves." It was an odd statement from a Congressman who has fought every effort to protect individuals from industrial excess, including defending the rights of corporations to pollute as they please. It's true that Obama last year stalled the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's plans to reduce smog-forming emissions from factories and tail pipes. But only Republicans have written into their platform a direct attack on the authority of the EPA, and branded attempts to limit coal industry pollution as a "War on Coal."

In the first year after the 2010 midterms, Republicans in the House floated nearly 200 pieces of legislation seeking to undermine or block environmental regulations or scientific findings, including the EPA's new rules for mercury pollution from coal plants and the proper disposal of toxic coal ash. Sens. Dean Heller, R-Nev., and John Barrasso, R-Wyo., even attempted to bar the agency from enforcing the Clean Water Act. The conservative view on pollution has also played out in states: Last year, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez began pushing to overturn the state's four-year-old "pit rule," which requires oil and gas producers to protect groundwater by lining the earthen pits where they dump waste.

None of those efforts has so far succeeded. Instead, the assault on environmental health has retreated to the courts. In mid-August, a federal appeals court led by Bush-appointee Brett Kavanaugh struck down an EPA rule to reduce interstate drift of harmful emissions from coal plants. The consequences are not abstract. "According to EPA statistics, every year that this rule is delayed there are literally thousands of avoidable deaths," says Bill Becker of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, "and tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of illnesses."

Unfortunately, in politics, death seems to be the accepted consequence of protecting industry's bottom line. In July, Montana Congressman and Senate candidate Denny Rehberg slipped a rider into the Labor Department's budget bill, blocking legislation that would have required mine operators to upgrade technology that protects miners from black lung disease, diagnoses of which have doubled since 1997. Rehberg and his allies argue that they're only waiting for a federal report, due as this issue went to press, to substantiate the need for new equipment. But Rehberg, who chairs a House Appropriations subcommittee regulating mine safety, has long shielded mining companies from federal authorities, blocking an EPA rule that would have required them to help pay for toxic waste cleanup. He is the fifth top recipient of campaign contributions from mining companies in 2012.

The sixth top recipient, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has said that the black lung regulation would cost industry too much. And that's always the argument: The cross-state pollution rule would have cost producers of coal-fired electricity $800 million a year starting in 2014, causing a rise in electricity rates anywhere from 0.1 percent to 14 percent. Obama's decision to ignore the advice of the EPA's staff scientists on ground-level ozone -- the most dangerous component of smog -- was based on his administration's determination that it would cost industry $90 billion annually and eliminate some jobs.

But does protecting public health really cost that much? "Those industry estimates almost inevitably turn out to be really overblown," says Deborah Shprentz, a consultant who reviews EPA clean air rules for the American Lung Association. "Once you set a standard, ingenuity kicks in and people figure out the most cost-effective way to meet it."

On the last day of August, Shprentz was busy finalizing comments on another EPA air rule, this time for soot. She hopes it will stand. "Air quality standards … define what's healthy and safe to breathe. The public has a right to know that kind of information."

Even Tea Partiers should be able to support the notion that we have the right to know, the right to stay healthy, and the right to keep our children safe. Those rights are in peril. In a landmark study by University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine, ground-level ozone was conclusively shown to cause asthma in teenagers who play sports. And smog kills: The EPA estimates that tightening the ozone emissions standard could save 12,000 lives every year.

In the heartless math of premature deaths versus the economy, that may not seem like much. But as Keck School Professor Andrea Hricko points out, the same number of deaths by any other cause would be deemed a public health emergency. Imagine if 10,000 people dropped dead from West Nile Virus -- or even in the flooding that follows a hurricane. Katrina claimed an estimated 1,000 to 1,500 lives, mostly in New Orleans; Isaac, less than 10, and all outside of the city. That is the result, quite literally, of the strong protecting the weak. No individual can build that kind of levee; no one alone can clean up her own air space or protect his own water source from industrial polluters. We built it, indeed.

]]>No publisherPoliticsPublic health2012/09/19 02:00:00 GMT-6ArticleThe Bay Area Chevron explosion shows gaps in refinery safetyhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/44.15/the-recent-bay-area-chevron-explosion-shows-gaps-in-refinery-safety
Oil refineries pose serious health hazards for nearby residents as well as workers, as the recent explosion in Richmond and other incidents, like one in Sinclair, Wyo., have made clear.When a crude-processing unit at Chevron's Richmond, Calif., refinery burst into flame in early August, sirens wailed through local neighborhoods as pillars of smoke blackened the sky over the city and surrounding hillsides.

The plant's emergency management system issued 18,000 calls to nearby residents, urging them to "shelter in place" -- closing windows, sealing cracks under doors with wet towels, turning off air conditioners -- until further notice. But hundreds of people, many from poor, predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods near the plant, said they received no calls. Jim McKay, a representative of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, told a town hall meeting the next day that there had been no adverse impacts to air quality. But in the days following the fire, more than 14,000 people poured into local hospitals complaining of respiratory problems.

Chevron's 100-year-old plant has long been a source of contention in this industrial East Bay city -- and for good reason. It supports hundreds of local businesses and injects millions into the local economy, but it's also racked up dozens of air-quality violations in the last year alone, not to mention three serious fires in the last 12 years. The Richmond refinery is the state's leading source of greenhouse gas emissions and a routine violator of the Clean Air and Clean Water acts.

But the facility is hardly an anomaly. With far less publicity, two smaller Wyoming refineries went up in flames within days of the Richmond blaze. The week before, a crude unit exploded at Cheyenne's Frontier refinery. Nearby residents described feeling the heat radiating from the burning plant as they scrambled to escape the jet-black plume. No alarms sounded; no emergency phone calls were made. A few days later (just a day before the Richmond accident) a refinery operated by Sinclair, near Rawlins, burst into flame, injuring a worker. This was merely the latest of six fires at that refinery in the past three years, three of them in the last three months. There have been numerous other incidents, including the illegal discharge of oil wastes that killed more than 100 birds. (In late August, the EPA announced $3.8 million in fines against Sinclair for repeated air pollution violations at its Wyoming refineries.)

Dig into the records of any of the country's refineries and you will find a similar litany of explosions, toxic releases, violations, worker injuries -- and deaths. A recent United Steelworkers report estimated that a fire breaks out, on average, every week at a U.S. refinery. Between 2000 and 2010, at least 117 workers were killed in the nation's oil refineries and coal-processing plants, according to Bureau of Labor statistics.

Of the 45 oil refineries scattered across eight Western states, 14 are considered "large," producing more than 75,000 barrels per day. All of these large refineries are located in or near major population centers -- and many smaller facilities are smack in the middle of towns and cities. The West's most serious recent refinery disaster happened at a large refinery owned by Tesoro in Anacortes, Wash. In 2010, an explosion there killed seven workers.

In response to that and dozens of other accidents in recent years, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the U.S. Chemical Safety Board have issued harsh proclamations. "Bluntly speaking, your workers are dying on the job and it has to stop," said Jordan Barab, OSHA deputy assistant secretary, to a 2010 conference of refinery and mining representatives. Barab later noted, "(OSHA) inspectors have found many facilities where safety programs that look good on paper don't follow through in practice." Subsequent inspections at 50 refineries produced an average of 17 worker-safety violations totaling nearly $2 million per facility.

OSHA and the Chemical Safety Board have urged companies to more closely adhere to 'Process Safety Management' regulations, which outline how to deal with toxic materials and potential spills, fires and releases. Both groups have also advocated wider use of automated systems that monitor operations.

But for all its tough talk, OSHA has spotty oversight and little regulatory pull with refineries. In 2010, OSHA secretary David Michaels called his agency's enforcement power "weak." Maximum fines for first-time safety violations are $7,000 -- pocket change for large oil companies. (Fines for repeat violations max out at $70,000, but are rarely issued.) OSHA's 2,000 inspectors are charged with the impossible task of monitoring 8 million jobsites across the country, with no system in place to track violations by companies that operate refineries in multiple states.

The hazards workers face are shared by the public. A 2011 study by the Center for Public Integrity, for example, found that 20 percent of Americans live near enough to a refinery to be sickened or killed in the event of a release of hydrofluoric acid, a highly toxic substance used in oil refining. So as OSHA pushes for greater workplace safety, what protocols are being put in place to safeguard communities? In the case of Richmond, not many, says Greg Karras, senior scientist with the watchdog group Communities for a Better Environment. He points to the refinery's air-monitoring system, which was designed to measure average ambient conditions rather than sudden pollutant spikes emitted from events like fires: "You can't find what you can't measure for."

Meanwhile, every day is a possible emergency for the hundreds of thousands of Westerners living near refineries. Even under 'normal' operating conditions, the list of hazardous emissions pouring from refinery stacks -- not to mention 'fugitive' emissions from leaking pipes -- is long. In addition to the usual suspects, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide and large particulates, all of which contribute to asthma and heart disease, there are heavy metals and carcinogens such as benzene, toluene and hydrocyanic acid.

Though "shelter in place" may be an effective -- if politically fraught -- short-term response to accidental releases of dangerous chemicals, simply living near a refinery may prove unexpectedly hazardous over the long term. A 2008 study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, for example, found elevated levels of vanadium, nickel and heavy particulates derived from oil refining in Richmond's air near the Chevron refinery. But the team found an even wider array of these chemicals inside homes beside the plant. Richmond resident Malik Seneferu, who spoke at the Chevron town hall meeting, articulated the worst fears of those living in the shadow of the oil industry: "Someone earlier said if Chevron leaves, we all die. ... But if Chevron stays, we all die, too."

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryPublic health2012/09/05 02:00:00 GMT-6ArticleCoal-export schemes ignite unusual opposition, from Wyoming to Indiahttps://www.hcn.org/issues/44.12/coal-export-schemes-ignite-unusual-opposition-from-wyoming-to-india
Ambitious schemes to build railroads and ports to ship Powder River Basin coal abroad will bring pollution and traffic to communities along the transport path, who are rising up in protest. On India's sweltering Western coast, Bharat Patel heads a group of traditional fishermen called Machimar Adhikar Sangharsh Samiti, which loosely translates as the Association for the Struggle for Fishworkers' Rights.

Meanwhile, up in the arid breaks of southeast Montana, Mark Fix wants to preserve the rural character of his 9,700-acre ranch along the Tongue River, where a couple hundred head of cattle share territory with wildlife ranging from great blue herons to beaver and prairie dogs.

Toss in grassroots environmental groups in India and China, some big worldwide green groups, plus more than 300 doctors in Oregon and Washington, local governments in towns like Mosier, Ore., and Edmonds, Wash., Sandpoint, Idaho, and Helena, Mont., numerous Northwest tribes, and the Chamber of Commerce in Burlington, Wash., a small town proud of its annual Berry Dairy Days festival.

What do these disparate parties have in common? They've all recently become allies in an environmental battle in the Western U.S. All are concerned that some of the world's biggest coal and railroad companies want to begin moving huge amounts of that fossil fuel from our country's mother lode -- the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming -- on rail lines across the Northwest to new port facilities, where it would be shipped to voracious power plants in Asian countries, mostly China and India. This scheme would cause pollution, noise and congestion everywhere along the rail line, and seriously worsen climate change, among other impacts.

"At both ends, local communities are getting trampled," says Justin Guay, a Sierra Club staffer based in Washington, D.C., who spends part of his time in India working with Bharat Patel's group.

On the Powder River Basin end, mining companies like Peabody and Arch have shipped coal by rail for decades, mostly eastward to U.S. power plants. But stricter U.S. regulations on coal combustion -- which releases toxic mercury, other heavy metals, sulfur compounds and carbon dioxide, a primary cause of climate change -- and the use of hydrofracturing to develop new sources have made natural gas a cheaper, better fuel for domestic power plants. That's why coal companies want to sell to Asia, where India and China are on a coal-fired power-plant building binge.

The thousands of fishermen in Patel's group oppose the construction of two gigantic coal plants on India's coast -- each at least 4,000 megawatts, roughly eight times larger than the average U.S. coal plant. They say that the coal plants are blocking their access to the shore and marketplaces, spreading pollution and discharging hot water that harms fish habitat. India already imports coal from places like Indonesia and Australia, and many in the industry think that the Powder River Basin coal, thanks to cheap federal leases and easy-to-access veins, will be competitively priced even after it's hauled all the way to Asia. Patel says that "policy makers are too focused on developing industries ... at the cost of degradation of the coastal environment," and calls for "new solutions to ... climate change."

In between the Powder River Basin and Asia, the coal must pass through many cities in mile-and-a-half-long trains, up to 60 per day, not counting the return traffic. Six new ports are proposed in Washington and Oregon to handle as much as 157 million tons of coal per year (roughly twice as much cargo as the states' existing ports handle). The Whatcom Docs, a group of more than 150 doctors near one of the proposed Washington ports, are "deeply concerned about the health and safety impacts," because coal dust and diesel fumes lodge in people's lungs, causing asthma, cancer and other illnesses, while long trains impede emergency vehicles trying to cross the tracks. Rancher Fix frames it more bluntly: "It's corporate greed -- making a buck on whoever's back you have to."

Of course, there would be benefits beyond electricity for Asia -- profits for investors and CEOs gorging at the trough, plus several thousand jobs in mining and construction (the companies would spend more than $2 billion on the ports alone), and taxes on the operations. But there would also be costs: In the communities split by the rail traffic, for instance, constructing a single overpass would require many millions of dollars –– costs that railroads typically outsource to the communities.

One portion of the scheme, the Tongue River Railroad -- a proposed 80-mile-long, half-billion-dollar spur to access an incredible 1.3 billion tons of undeveloped coal in Montana's Otter Creek area -- would force its way across Fix's ranch, condemning a three-mile-long path for the tracks, carving through bluffs, separating much of the ranch from the river, and destroying his peace and quiet. That's why Fix -- a third-generation rancher who worked as an engineer inspecting nuclear-missile silos before he settled beside the river in 1991 -- has challenged the Tongue River Railroad proposals, together with a ranchers' group he belongs to, the Northern Plains Resource Council.

The ranchers won a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling last December that says the federal Surface Transportation Board must do a new environmental impact statement; previous EISes that approved segments of the Tongue River Railroad are outdated. On June 18, that agency, which tends to be pro-industry, began the EIS process. Other EISes will be done on the proposed ports by a stew of federal, state and local agencies, including the pro-industry Army Corps of Engineers.

The opponents want thorough evaluations that weigh all the impacts, with public hearings around the Northwest that would give time to speakers like Kimberly Larson, a staffer for Climate Solutions, a Washington group that advocates for wind and solar power. "The coal companies need a new market for their drug," she says, "just like we saw with tobacco companies," which emphasized overseas sales when health warnings and taxes eroded their U.S. customer base. Industry, however, prefers narrow evaluations -- a local hearing that only weighs the construction of a new dock, for instance. And industry is optimistic: In the last few weeks, a couple of companies leased additional Powder River Basin deposits -- with their eyes fixed on Asia.